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2013, L’Oréal For Women in Science

Tracking the spread of deadly diseases

Dr Kathryn (Kat) Holt, Bio21 Institute, The University of Melbourne

Kathryn-Holt-700x500-2 Kat Holt is using genetics, maths and supercomputers to study the whole genome of deadly bacteria and work out how they spread. Studying a typhoid epidemic in Kathmandu, she found that it didn’t spread in the way we thought epidemics did. Her research, published in Nature Genetics, will change how we go about responding to epidemics.

With the support of her L’Oréal For Women in Science Fellowship, Kat will be using the same techniques to understand how antibiotic-resistant bacteria spread in Melbourne hospitals. Are people catching these superbugs in hospital, or are they bringing the bugs into hospital with them? Can we give the intensive care clinicians early warning of a drug-resistant bacteria in their patients?

Kathryn (Kat) has been a pioneer ever since she became the first student at the University of Western Australia to undertake an honours year in the then-fledgling area of bioinformatics.

Kat ventured across the Nullarbor to the other side of Australia—to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne—where she sought advice from bioinformatics guru Prof Terry Speed. As a result, she ended up as a doctoral student at the world renowned Sanger Institute at the University of Cambridge, one of the homes of the human genome project.
Continue reading Tracking the spread of deadly diseases →

2013, L’Oréal For Women in Science

How Australia and India broke up—100 million years ago

Dr Joanne (Jo) Whittaker, Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart

Dr Joanne (Jo) Whittaker likes to solve jigsaw puzzles. Now this marine geoscientist is tackling the biggest puzzle on the planet—the formation of continents.
With SDP_0059 the help of Australia’s national marine research vessels, and now her L’Oréal Fellowship, Jo is reconstructing how the Indian, Australian and Antarctic tectonic plates separated over the past 200 million years, forming the Indian Ocean and the continents as we see them today. This information will help us model climate change better, find new gas resources, and understand the dynamics of the land in which we live.

The piece of this jigsaw she is now working on centres on two underwater plateaux, the Batavia and Gulden Draak Knolls, towering about 3000 metres above the Perth Abyssal Plain (PAP), which is around 1600 kilometres off the coast of Geraldton in Western Australia. In November 2011, Jo’s team mapped and sampled rocks from both knolls. Based on the evidence so far, Jo says, it looks like they split from the margins of the moving Indian Plate about 100 million years ago.
Continue reading How Australia and India broke up—100 million years ago →

2013, L’Oréal For Women in Science

When killing saves lives: our immune system at work

Dr Misty Jenkins, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Melbourne

Misty-Jenkins-700x500 Dr Misty Jenkins spends a lot of her time watching killers at work: the white blood cells of the body that eliminate infected and cancerous cells. She can already tell you a great deal about how they develop into assassins and arm themselves. Now with the support of her L’Oréal For Women in Science Fellowship Misty is exploring how they become efficient serial killers—killing one cancer cell in minutes and moving on to hunt down others. Her work will give us a greater understanding of our immune system and open the way to better manage T cells to defeat disease.

Misty’s career so far has been quite a journey for a girl from Ballarat. Along the way she been mentored by Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Prof Peter Doherty and become the first Indigenous Australian to attend either Oxford or Cambridge. Now working with Prof Joe Trapani as a National Health and Medical Research Council  (NHMRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Cancer Cell Death laboratory at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Misty has been awarded a $25,000 L’Oréal Australia and New Zealand For Women in Science Fellowship. She will use the money to further her study of what triggers T cells to detach themselves from their targets and seek additional prey.
Continue reading When killing saves lives: our immune system at work →

2012, L’Oréal For Women in Science

More efficient solar cells with quantum dots

Dr Baohua Jia

Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia

The global race to develop high efficiency, low cost solar energy is fierce. And Baohua Jia and her colleagues are front runners.

Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Baohua Jia, Swinburne University of Technology (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Baohua Jia, Swinburne University of Technology (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

Conventional solar cells are efficient, but thick and expensive. Baohua and her colleagues imagine a future when solar cells are so thin and cheap that city skyscrapers will be powered by a coating on their glass. But at present such thin-film solar cells are not efficient enough for general use.

Using her knowledge of nanotechnology and optics, Baohua and her colleagues have already created thin-film solar cells that are more than 20 per cent more efficient than those of her competitors. They have already lodged two patents.

But Baohua thinks she can do better. And that will be the focus of the work assisted by her $25,000 L’Oréal Australia & New Zealand For Women in Science Fellowship.

Continue reading More efficient solar cells with quantum dots →

2012, L’Oréal For Women in Science

New treatments for blood cancers

Dr Kylie Mason

Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital, Melbourne, Australia

Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Kylie Mason, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)
Click image for hi-res. Photo: Dr Kylie Mason, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research/Royal Melbourne Hospital (credit: L’Oréal Australia/sdpmedia.com.au)

Dr Kylie Mason has set herself the goal of developing new ways of treating diseases that are considered incurable.

Continue reading New treatments for blood cancers →

Stories of Astronomy 2012

Telescope of tiles

No moving parts – a new kind of radio telescope
The Murchison Widefield Array is a telescope with no moving parts. Credit: David Herne, ICRAR

Far outback in Western Australia, 32 tiles—flat, stationary sensors—each carrying 16 dipole antennas have begun collecting scientific data.

These first tiles will ultimately form part of a much bigger array of 512 tiles, the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA)—Australia’s second Square Kilometre Array (SKA) demonstrator project. Like CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the MWA is being built at the remote, radio-quiet Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory (MRO). Continue reading Telescope of tiles →

Stories of Astronomy 2012

Managing a data mountain

The world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), is expected to generate more data in a single day than the world does in a year at present. And even its prototype, CSIRO’s ASKAP, is expected to accumulate more information within six hours of being switched on than all previous radio telescopes combined.

Such gargantuan streams of data require serious management, and that will be one of the jobs of the $80 million iVEC Pawsey Centre in Perth, which is due to be completed in 2013.

The planned Pawsey High-Performance Computing Centre for SKA Science in Perth (photo credit: Woodhead/CSIRO)

Continue reading Managing a data mountain →

Stories of Astronomy 2012

Tracing cosmic rays from radio pulses

‘THE DISH’ AT PARKES. CREDIT: SETH SHOSTAK
‘THE DISH’ AT PARKES. CREDIT: SETH SHOSTAK

The energy of ultra-high energy (UHE) cosmic rays that strike the Earth’s atmosphere make the energy produced from particle collisions by the Large Hadron Collider look puny. A team based in South Australia is now developing the techniques and technology to find out where such energetic particles could possibly originate. They ultimately hope to use the proposed SKA telescope to conduct their search.

“We think some cosmic rays are produced in the remnants of supernovae—exploding stars—but where the most energetic ones come from, that’s a mystery,” says Justin Bray, a PhD student hunting for their source as part of the LUNASKA (Lunar Ultra-high-energy Neutrino Astrophysics using SKA) project led by Ray Protheroe at the University of Adelaide and Ron Ekers at CSIRO. Continue reading Tracing cosmic rays from radio pulses →

Stories of Astronomy 2012

Australia’s SKA demonstrator already booked out

The sky's no limit with ASKAP
THE FIRST ASKAP DISH BEING ERECTED IN FEBRUARY 2010. CREDIT: DAVE DEBOER, CSIRO

It’s not due to begin operating until 2013, but astronomers from around the world are already lining up to use CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP). In fact, the first five years of ASKAP’s operation are already booked out, with ten major international Survey Science projects looking for pulsars, measuring cosmic magnetic fields, studying millions of galaxies, and more. Continue reading Australia’s SKA demonstrator already booked out →

Stories of Astronomy 2012

PlayStation graphics chips drive astronomy supercomputer

MATTHEW BAILES IN THE SWINBURNE VIRTUAL REALITY THEATRE IN FRONT OF AN IMAGE OF THE DOUBLE PULSAR DISCOVERED WITH CSIRO’S PARKES RADIO TELESCOPE. CREDIT: SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY.
MATTHEW BAILES IN THE SWINBURNE VIRTUAL REALITY THEATRE IN FRONT OF AN IMAGE OF THE DOUBLE PULSAR DISCOVERED WITH CSIRO’S PARKES RADIO TELESCOPE. CREDIT: SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY.

The technology used in your PC or PlayStation is also helping drive a revolution in radio astronomy—the replacement of custom-built hardware with flexible software and data solutions.

“Hardware solutions for radio astronomy have been evolving, but computer power has been evolving much faster,” says Matthew Bailes, from the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. The Centre has developed software systems that are now used in Australia and overseas. Continue reading PlayStation graphics chips drive astronomy supercomputer →